Why do we watch tennis matches? It’s a minor, niggling little question, I know, but it wouldn’t leave my head Friday morning during the quarterfinal between Novak Djokovic and David Nalbandian in Monte Carlo. There you had a square red stage and an audience huddled over it, all next to a big blue sea. Usually this combination registers as little more than scenic to me. But today it made me think, maybe inaccurately, of a Greek theater. What used to happen on its stages? Catharis? An outward expression of the larger group's innermost psychological issues? Right? Watching Djokovic and Nalbandian fight themselves and each other for two sets, it seemed to me like a very modern ritual of catharsis. A catharsis of stress.
The spur for these thoughts came from a conversation I had this week with Allen Fox. He’s a former Davis Cupper and Pepperdine men’s coach, and a guru of everything mental in tennis. It’s hard not to learn something about the sport when you talk to him. Last year I wrote a piece for this blog, which was then adapted as an article in TENNIS magazine, about the excuses all tennis players make, and how they’re both ridiculous and inevitable. Fox takes the idea a step farther. While I’ve always thought of an excuse as a kind of lie to yourself, he says that it’s rarely a lie at all, that most excuses are, to some degree, true. In this sense, even the garden-variety “it just wasn’t my day,” qualifies as an excuse. We really can’t live without them; they’re what allows us to explain defeat, put it behind us, and try again. Fox says that unconsciously most of us start working on our excuses even before a match is over, instead of using that mental energy to figure out a way around whatever issue we're having. To him, good players are, at the most fundamental level, problem solvers. It’s not that they play their best, or even anywhere near it, more often than the rest of us. It's that they know it doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to ignore that little excuse, that little escape hatch, that’s being prepared for you in one dark corner of your brain.
This week I talked to Fox for a magazine story I’m writing about how to approach, from a mental perspective, various stages of a match—the first game; the game after you’ve broken serve; if you're way ahead; match point, etc. In the middle of our conversation, he observed that tennis’s scoring system may be the most stress-inducing of all sports'. It’s one of the very few that isn’t purely cumulative; there are pressure moments built into the score—ads, games, sets—all the way through a match. These are particularly nerve-wracking because they’re all-or-nothing situations. If you play a long deuce game and lose it, you end up with nothing; ditto if you play a long set and lose it. You can win six games and dozens of points, but if you lose a tiebreaker, you walk away with nada. It’s a sport designed to keep you from escaping pressure. I’m rarely as nervous in a match as I am after I’ve come back from 0-40 on my serve to 30-40. I know that one shank will render my good work over the previous two points worthless.
From my experience, which wasn’t contradicted by the pros at Monte Carlo today, stress works equally on the player who’s winning and the one who’s losing. It’s a cliché of the sport that, right after you break serve, you’re in danger of being broken right back. That’s because you’ve done the natural thing and taken a mental breather after pushing hard and going through the tension of trying to break your opponent. Conversely, if you’ve been broken, you may react by letting your mental guard down and getting discouraged. Either way, you’re doing what we all do automatically: You’re running from the unpleasant experience of stress. I’m particularly, maybe even unnaturally, guilty of running as fast as I can from it on a tennis court. I’ve lost matches because, in the back of my mind, I was afraid to build a lead. I knew that if did I build it, I would then be faced with the horrible pressure of not blowing it. Call it pre-choking.
Djokovic is not that bad, of course. On most occasions he survives the stress, both of his opponent’s making and his own making. What he isn’t good at is hiding it. Against Nalbandian he cruised through the first set and played well to break early in the second. That’s when, just at the moment when he spotted the finish line coming up over the hill in the distance, the doubts set in. He breathed more deeply, he threw his hands in the air in exasperation for the first time, he took extra time toweling off and bouncing the ball before he served. The question was not whether Djokovic could beat Nalbandian to the finish line, but whether he could avoid tripping himself before he got there.
This is another terrible thing about the stress of tennis: Rather than dissipating when you play well, it builds to its maximum as you get closer to match point. There, on that precipice, you can see, feel, taste, victory on the other side—it tastes like relief (catharsis) more than anything else. It’s natural, as you get close to match point, to begin to hope you get there, rather than trying to make it happen. But of course you can’t hope anything into existence. Djokovic, despite some self-inflicted stumbles, made it across, in part because he got some help from Nalbandian. The Argentine rushed a backhand down the line at break point and never threatened again. After that moment, he may have been guilty of his own form of escape, of subconsciously caving into the bogus but convenient excuse that “it wasn’t his day.” It’s harder to tell with Nalbandian. He doesn’t ask as much from himself on the court as Djokovic does.
Stress, release, stress, release: What else is there to our days? I go to a meeting, the meeting ends, and I feel elated for no reason, except that the one event that I had planned for the day, the one event where something could conceivably have gone wrong, or at least unpredictably, is over. I don’t even care how it turned out; what’s important is that it’s done. This is the theatre of tennis: The sport takes one person—a proxy for you—and forces him, all alone, in front of the rest of us, to play a game that has the most tension-filled scoring system imaginable. He’s acting out our daily life in a much more glamorous, risky, and frightening way than we’ll ever experience. We watch because we want to identify with these player-actors at their most nervous and human. We want to know that it happens to everyone. But we also watch because we want to see them overcome those human nerves in ways that we know we never could. It must be terrible for these player-actors to live this out for us. It also must be addictive as hell.
Two moments stick in my head from Friday's matches (I didn’t see Verdasco react in his own inimitable way to the pressure of a lead). At match point, Djokovic hit a drop shot, which is the classic flee-from-stress maneuver, and one that he goes to regularly. As it sailed toward the net, he extended his arm forward, physically hoping that it would make it over, end the match, and let him relax again. The other moment came earlier in the day, when Rafael Nadal, down break point at 2-1 in the first set against Juan Carlos Ferrero, belted a few shots that might normally have won him the point. JC got them back, and Nadal ended up at the net, where he nearly made an excellent drop volley off a well-hit passing shot. But the volley caught the tape and landed on his side. I expected Nadal, like most other players, to stand and look at the net and the ball, put his hands on his hips, and allow himself a little stress-free dip into the well of self-pity—“how could the net do that to me?” Instead, without even glancing at the ball, he turned around, walked quickly back to the baseline, and called for the towel. He was right: Ferrero had played an outstanding point and there was nothing he could do about it. There was no reason, as Allen Fox might say, to let the perfect become the enemy of the good enough.
Two moments, two reactions to stress. As a member of this clay-court theatre’s worldwide audience, I enjoyed one—Djokovic’s—because I could identify with it. I enjoyed the other—Nadal’s—because I couldn’t.
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Have a good weekend. Try to relax.